Polish president backs Trump over nuclear pact with Russia

Poland understands US leader Donald Trump’s motives in planning to withdraw America from a nuclear pact with Russia, the Polish president was cited as saying on Tuesday.

Speaking while on a visit to Berlin, Andrzej Duda said that Trump’s recent announcement that Washington would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia was “the kind of response that President Donald Trump has today to the scenario that Russia has pursued for years, namely one based on systematic violations of this agreement and, essentially, proliferation of medium-range missiles.”

Responding to a question during a meeting with his German counterpart, Duda added: “From our Polish point of view, this primarily concerns the Kaliningrad region,” Russia’s Baltic Sea exclave across the Polish border.

“We are constantly receiving information about more missiles being brought to the Kaliningrad region,” he said.

New satellite images appear to show that Russia has upgraded some of its military installations in its westernmost region of Kaliningrad, near the Polish border, US broadcaster CNN reported last week.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was a landmark 1987 agreement signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to remove nuclear weapons from Europe.

Critics of the plan announced by Trump warn that the US withdrawing from the pact might lead to a new nuclear arms race, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.